The Visitation

Luca Cambiaso was the leading painter in Genoa, Italy, in the sixteenth century, during a period of strong patronage of the arts. A confident and bold draughtsman, Cambiaso developed a drawing style in which, from the 1560s, forms were radically simplified, including figures being reduced to geometric shapes. This distinctive approach – described as ‘proto-cubist’– may have been influenced by his study of treatises on the proportions of the human figure, which were popular in the Renaissance.

This drawing expresses a remarkable distillation of the emotional power of the biblical story of the meeting of the Virgin and St Elizabeth, her elderly cousin. The joy of the Virgin at the miracle of St Elizabeth’s pregnancy with St John the Baptist is conveyed by Cambiaso through his dramatic depiction of light.  

Not linked to a known painting or fresco, this drawing may have been completed as a study for an unrealised project, or as an independent work.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs